China At Last Joins The Scramble For Africa

From the January-March 2006 issue of Socialist Banner, the quarterly journal of WSM members in Africa.

The recent announcement by the Senegalese to re-establish diplomatic ties with Mainland China did not come as a surprise to many. This move understandably signified an end to diplomatic ties with Taiwan. This comes in the wake of intensified efforts on the part of the Chinese authorities to get involved in "Africa's development". In this regard, their Foreign Minister, Li Zhaoxing officially unveiled an African Policy Paper (APP) on 12th February 2006 which outlined the future relationship between Africa and China. This was immediately followed by his tour of several African countries from 11th to 19th January.

Why, one would ask, have the Chinese authorities only just realised that they must redouble their efforts to assist in Africa's development? The policy document on Africa answers the question. As is always the case in carrot-and-stick diplomacy, it starts by promising that China, will "co-ordinate positions on major international and regional issues and stand for mutual support on major issues concerning state sovereignty, territorial integrity, national dignity and human rights." Of course, this kind of hackneyed phrase-mongering is what the bankrupt African leaders want to hear so as to justify to their suffering people the need to bring in the Chinese business interests.

The rest of the content of the APP was devoted to the real intentions of China. First, it made it clear that "the Chinese government will adopt more effective measures to facilitate African commodities access to the Chinese market." This makes it clear that the focal point of China-Africa relationship is resource-based. China's economy, measured in terms of the capitalist yardstick, is growing at an alarming rate and, therefore, it is in dire need of raw materials. As a result, the document states further that "the Chinese government encourages and supports Chinese enterprises' investment and business in Africa, and will continue to provide preferential loans and buyer credits to this end". This, it said, would be done without any political strings attached.

The policy paper also promises to promote high level military-related technological exchanges with African countries, to continue to train African military personnel and support defence and army building of African countries for their own security.

However, one does not need to read between the lines to understand this desperate more by China to increase its role in "Africa's development". The African people must take cue from the age-old adage that once bitten twice shy. The western business interests (represented by their governments in London, Paris, Washington etc) entered Africa under the guise of bringing civilisation to barbaric Africa. The rest of the story is known to all. Therefore African people, not African rulers and their masters in big business, must realise that the Chinese are only coming as competitors to the traditional exploiters.

The pledge by China to co-operate with Africans on military matters means not only that China will sell Africa its obsolete military wares but in doing so it will also equip and strengthen state security forces in Africa, enabling them to better hold down the people so that the looting Africas resources can go on smoothly.

Another equally important aspect to the Chinese design is to use African countries as a pawn in their decade-old conflict with Taiwan. African countries that do not recognise Taiwan are sure to get Chinese foreign direct investment, aid and military assistance.

How then can African people react to this attempt by Chinese business to join in the scramble for the continents resources? Do we manifest our objection to the whole issue through mass demonstrations? This will not lead anyone anywhere, as rulers and their partners in business control the forces of coercion and will not hesitate to unleash them on defenceless civilians, as has happened all too often. Do we attempt to overthrow the governments? No - this will not only lead to violence and bloodshed in which only the innocent die and experience testifies that the new group of leaders will only turn out to be the same as, if not worse than, their predecessors.

The only way forward, therefore, is to endeavour to let as many people as possible understand the nature of system that is in operation in today's world - the capitalist system. It is a system that is global in nature. It is a system in which only a minority of people control the wealth and resources of the world and in which the majority live lives of poverty, denied access to the necessaries of life. Through their control of these resources they also effectively control governments. In fact, business and government are on the same side against the majority working class. Therefore, to put an effective and a definitive end to such looting and plundering, as the Western business interests are already deeply involved in and which now Chinese big business is contemplating, the capitalist system must go.

PG

Other articles in the latest issue of Socialist Banner include:
- NGOs: Friends or Foes?
- Kenya's Referendum Farce
- Hunger in the Sahel
- Zimbabwe
- African Leaders and the United Nations

For more details on the Socialist Banner and other literature produced by the World Socialist Movement, email spgb@worldsocialism.org

Chomsky (2006)

Book Review from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wolfgang Sperlich: Noam Chomsky. Reaktion Books.

This is a volume in the Critical Lives series, so it opens with a brief biographical sketch of Chomsky, noting that he was influenced by writers such as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. It's good to learn that by his early teens Chomsky was not just opposed to Stalinism but was also "a pretty committed anti-Leninist". Then comes a chapter on his contributions to linguistics and philosophy, though to be honest you'd need to have some prior idea of his views here to make much sense of Sperlich's presentation.

The main chapter is entitled 'Political Activist', and it presents Chomsky's writings on various political issues, concentrating on his exposures of US foreign policy. This is a decent guide to Chomsky's attacks on the US government, military and establishment, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, the Middle East to the aftermath of 9/11. Unfortunately there's little attempt at elaborating Chomsky's own views on how society should be organised, other than labelling him variously as an anarcho-syndicalist and a libertarian socialist. He's quoted at on point as saying, "capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of 'possessive individualism' - all must be regarded as fundamentally anti-human." Also that a consistent anarchist must oppose wage slavery and private ownership of the means of production.

Chomsky has often expressed his support for 'left wing' governments in the developing world. With regard to the president of Brazil, Sperlich writes, "I ask Chomsky if Lula da Silva shouldn't have abolished the state of Brazil by now and introduced council communism or anarcho-syndicalist freedom. Chomsky answers that it's easy for us to say such things because we do not have to live with the consequences - Lula da Silva has to." Perhaps Chomsky should have said that it was a bloody stupid question, based on the assumption that a political leader can introduce a new social system.

The last chapter summarises Chomsky's work on the mass media as a tool for suppressing the truth and presenting a pro-capitalist view of the world, for (in the title of one of Chomsky's books) 'Manufacturing Consent'.

So this is a useful if unexciting guide to Chomsky's ideas. And until I read Sperlich I didn't know there is a radio station called Radio Chomsky, even if it is in New Zealand.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: More Slaughter in the Middle East (2006)

Editorial from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again in the Middle East innocent workers are being killed and useful structures destroyed. The immediate cause was the capture in a raid from Lebanon of two Israeli soldiers but the ultimate isssue was, once again, who controls this oil-rich region: the US and its allies or various local elites?

All states are artificial and illegitimate but Israel is particularly so. Set up by colonists from Europe on the basis of fables recounted in a book supposedly emanating from a god, it has been armed and financed by the United States as its only reliable ally in the region. Over the years it has acted as Americas gendarme there to deal with sections of the local Arab ruling classes who have sought to challenge US domination. These sections, in their turn, have identified Israel for what it is and have sought to destroy it and have been able to win considerable popular support.

This is not to say that Israel is under direct US control. The rulers of Israel have their own agenda and can, and do, act independently of their protector. But thats a price the US has to pay to avoid sending its own troops to fight and die there. The US would like some compromise solution between Israel and local Arab elites but in the meantime gives Israel a virtual free hand, only issuing ritual appeals to it to exercise restraint.

Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon, is armed and financed by two states whose regime the US has vowed to change: Iran and Syria. It is entirely possible that the present crisis was deliberately provoked by Iran, which has ambitions to be the dominant regional power, as a means of bringing counter-pressure on the US in the diplomatic trial of strength going on over its nuclear programme, a means of showing that it too is not without bargaining counters. Israel, incidentally, is without doubt already a nuclear power, which shows up the US hypocrisy over the spread of nuclear weapons.

So, as a conflict over which states and ruling classes should dominate the region, no working class interest is involved except in so far as it is they who are its innocent victims and need the killing, maiming and destruction to stop. Socialists are always spontaneously on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors and the massive use of overwhelming force by the state of Israel clearly exposes it as the oppressor. But just because we sympathise with the victims of Israeli oppression does not mean that we favour the solutions popular amongst them.

A Palestinian state would be a capitalist state. "Anti-imperialism" is the slogan of local elites who wish to dominate the region in place of the US, a situation which would still leave the mass of the population there exploited and oppressed with the eternal problem of finding enough money to buy the things they need to live.

Capitalism is a war-prone society with a built-in clash of interests between states over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes and strategic points to protect these. In the Middle East the conflict is over oil, and strategic points to protect its supply and transport, which has already led to many wars there.

The only lasting way out is to get rid of capitalism and replace it by a world society of common ownership and democratic control. On that basis, the resources of the world, including oil, could be extracted and used for the benefit of all the people of the world. Poverty and misery in the Middle East, as elsewhere, could be ended once and for all. The waste of arms and the horrors of war would disappear.

Socialism is, quite literally and without exaggeration, the hope of humanity. 

Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834 (2002)

The Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival is an event held every year on the third weekend of the July in the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, England to mark and celebrate the memory of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm labourers who, in 1834, were arrested, convicted and transported to Australia for forming a trade union as a means of resisting the lowering of their wages.

The event is organised and attended by trade unionists, and in amongst the beers, the bands and the bouncy castles, occasionally a bit of politics breaks out in the form of stalls being staffed by political parties, and leaflets distributed to the attendees. The following is the text of a leaflet that was distributed by members of the Socialist Party at the event in 2002.

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community".

The above will be familiar to members of the Socialist Party as the party's object. It was, however, found on a web site celebrating the commemoration of the Tolpuddle martyrs. It demonstrates the extraordinary range of appeal that the memory of the "Dorset martyrs" still holds, from all sections of the left of capitalism.

The remembrance of the persecution of early unionism and the celebration of the ultimate triumph, both of reprieve of the martyrs and the ultimate widespread growth of trade unionism, seems to provoke outbursts of seeming socialist ambition. The tradition still continues, this year on 20 and 21 July with the annual TUC rally in Tolpuddle. Like all such occasions marking the history of working class struggle, the left makes it an opportunity to bluster about its "values" and, largely invented, history. These displays, of course, are in stark contrast to the reality of the achievements of the left and the tattered remnants of its ambitions.

The use of a socialist object in relation to the annual Tolpuddle rally is appropriate in recording the contribution made by working men and women in a period of rapid social change and industrial advance, accompanied by political persecution. Such resistance as was heroically given by those convicted of forming a union at Tolpuddle deserves to be remembered, along with other early political movements (such as Owenism, Chartism, republicanism) that allowed the eventual formulation of a socialist political party to be possible. But the use of socialist slogans by trade unionists and political parties whose aims are a long way short of anything approaching socialism is mere canting hypocrisy.

It may seem rather too obvious, to those fetishising "struggle", but what the cause of socialism needs is socialists. The struggles of the working class of the last two hundred years should tell us one thing - that it is futile to seek to fight a rearguard action against capitalism. The most successful movements of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries had programmes that sought to maximise gains within emergent and rapidly expanding industrial capitalism. In politics, the Chartists challenged for political democracy, the success of which may have had revolutionary implications. In social thought, Owenism provided a critique of competition, combining the need for co-operation and the potential of harnessing of machines to humankind rather than the harnessing of workers to machines. In the economic sphere, trade unionism sought to increase the standard of living of the working class, including moves towards general unionism and, in the first decades of the twentieth century, syndicalism.

Socialists of course recognise the limitations of these movements. Chartism and trade unionism sought to increase the power of the working class, while Owenism tried to transcend it despite being at base a paternal, regulated capitalism. The threads and influence of all three, however, can be seen in the emergence of Marxian thought and the development of a programme emphasising the need to replace capitalism according to the design of the workers rather than reform the worst aspects of existing society.

The struggle of the working class to build a new society, replacing capitalist private ownership and competition with common ownership and production for use rather than profit resulted in the emergence, by the late nineteenth century of a growing movement pressing for something approaching socialism. The challenge recognised the nature of the source of working class exploitation in the productive process and saw poverty, material and mental, next to vast accumulations of private capital amidst the productive potential for material abundance for all.

It is unfortunate that as it grew, working class opposition to capitalism reacted to its partial concessions from capital by withdrawing its ambition from social revolution to social reformation. Here emerged, not the replacement of capitalism by socialism, but the incorporation of "labour" into existing productive relations. Paradoxically, the ideological justification for this (the "gradual" advance of working class interests rather than "inexpedient" socialism now) has not produced, by the twenty-first century, an emergent socialist society, but an almost complete withdrawal of most inheritors of this kind of position from any kind of programme which comes close to criticism of modern capitalist society.

So, what to do? No surprise here, I am afraid. No easy ways out. If you want socialism then you should be a socialist. If we, collectively as socialists, want socialism then we should make socialists. How is this to be done? Well, we can rule out "gradual" reform. A hundred years of that has brought us further back than we were in the beginning. What about a programme of ambitious reforms first with a genuine desire for revolution later - a "dialectical" strategic disappointment and a vanguard leadership for workers when they realise that capitalism cannot be reformed without new problems (inflation, for example)? Well, if you want someone else to direct you, if you want to work for a programme you know will fail, if you want to lie to lead, well, yes. But if not, if you regard democracy as important, then it is necessary to recognise that it is us, the working class, who must make socialism for ourselves and that we cannot be led to socialism.

As for programmes, if you want to work for union rights, benefits, full employment, against war, just name your cause, then join the Labour party to try and make them make promises or the Socialist Alliance or the ex-Militants who make promises they cannot keep. And, in ten or twenty years time, be prepared to be no further forward than you are now.

If people vote for an "ethical" foreign policy or an increase in public spending, in the name of socialism, and all they get is broken promises, because the global finance pulls the plug, or roaring inflation, then people will think that is what socialism is. Simple. However, if people vote for capitalism, in the name of capitalism, and get capitalism, then they might want something else. This has happened to some extent with the disillusion over New Labour and there is promise in the new (and growing?) "anti-capitalist" movement.

If it is solutions to world poverty you want, to insecurity, to global power politics, to war, then socialism, production for use not profit under democratic control (not just as a slogan but as actuality), that offers a positive solution, rather than valid but hopeless criticism. By all means let us defend and increase our share of the wealth we produce in capitalism. But if you want more than this, if we want something else, something better in the twenty-first century and beyond than we had in the decadent twentieth century, if you want something to work for rather than against, if you want socialism, then join the socialists.

Colin Skelly

The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)

It turns out that Channel 4 is currently repeating Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH on its More4 channel. Best known for his earlier TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, which by common consent is considered one of the most important and best loved dramas in the history of British television, Bleasdale was lauded and condemned in equal measure for GBH because so many people thought it was little more than a knockabout attack on the local politics of his hometown, Liverpool, and the then Militant Tendency's domination of its Labour council. Reproduced below is a review of the drama that appeared in the Socialist Standard at the time of its original showing, which delves deeper and goes beyond the notion that Bleasdale was doing little more than writing ten hours of television drama so that he could stick the metaphorical boot into Derek Hatton.

The Off the Telly website carries an interesting article on GBH, as part of a series of articles on Bleasdale and his work.

TV Review From The August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four hyped it relentlessly as a Great Drama of our times. Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader. The Right wing objected because the series portrayed MI5 as being a shower of devious criminals - heaven forbid the thought. The SWP, who rarely comprehend anything that was not written by a dead Russian, denounced Bleasdale as a brown-nose who sold out to the ruling class. GBH (C4, Wednesdays and Sundays) seems to have upset them all. So does all great drama.

What was GBH about? Taken literally, it was implausible nonsense. Whole cities are not thrown into chaos by half a dozen or so Equity ruffians; Good and Evil rarely take on such vivid personal realisations as Murray and Nelson; even corrupt Labour leaders have more political know-how than Murray was shown as having. As fictional political history the series was drivel. Sadly, it is as fictional political history (FPH) that most lefties watched it and switched off in disgust. GBH was about power. It was about why people lust for political leadership, what they do with it, and how, after all the panting after it and delusion of luxuriating in it, most politicians come to discover that they do not really have it. Politicians are tools of power. The French professor, Maximilien Rubel, once wrote a letter to the Socialist Standard saying that the people who are our rulers are paranoid megalamaniacs who cannot be trusted. Maybe so, maybe not - certainly, even the most balanced of leaders must act like a madman if they are to dance to the cacophony of the profit system. Michael Murray, abused and beaten by power, became a political abuser and beater. It was the only way he knew. The political was personal. The brilliance of Bleasdale's writing was that Murray, the hateful petty tyrant, was so much more than that. He was more even than a comical, power-hungry stooge; a modern Chaplinesque Great Dictator. Murray was a man with whom we empathised. His was a world of the used and the users; he had been used and now he tried to use others. His world was our world: the world of human exploitation on every level.

Jim Nelson, Michael Palin's romantic hero of the series, was a man afraid and therefore strong because he understood - or began to do so - his fear. He spoke more than once of how in our society the poison is seeping down. The poison in question is the poison of power-madness and obsessive exploitation. The simplification that evil emanates from Tory bastards may have satisfied simple-minded rebels a decade ago, but now it is clearer to see just how the human perversions of power-madness are coming from all directions, including those movements which pose as being for the people. In short, the fleas from the Tory dog have rubbed off on to the Labour poodles who can only fight the Tories by being like Tories. As for Militant, it is infiltrating amongst the fleas, only able to get power by being more loathsome than the rest. They are playing the same game.

The message of GBH is that if you try to beat the Devil by dressing up as Satan you end up not being able to tell who is who. Murray thought he was being manipulated by Trots when he was really being used by MI5. The only reason he couldn't tell the difference is because there wasn't any. MI5 broke Murray. Bleasdale overstated the real power of the state to intervene in electoral politics. But then this was not FPH. What he got right was the power of the decent many to resist the arrogant few. That is one of the most hopeful political lessons; it must be, for workers are the many and the force against us is the very, very few. The scene in the final episode when the "decent workers", as the caricature portrayed them, stopped the "ignorant little gobshites", as the script referred to the thuggish Trots, from dictating to the majority was an inspiring moment. At that meeting leadership collapsed and illusory power was no shield: Murray wept and the boys who had only ever read one book and knew how to shout slogans were shown that democracy is bigger than them.

But wait a minute. Where was that great scene taking place? In the Labour Party hall. What was a bloke of principle and courage doing in that old wreck of a political whore-house? Here we see Bleasdale the faithful Labourite overcoming the writer of insight. On one level GBH was a series about why Labour should expel Militant. We socialists could not care less if they expel them or sleep with them or form a coalition with the Monster Raving Loonies, but if that is the political message which was being offered to us, then when are we to see the series about hypocritical, compromising, well-bribed Labour "moderates" who do not need to be crushed by MI5 because they are safe? You do not need state conspiracies to neutralise Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair - they come ready-neutered.

GBH will be talked about for a long time to come. It should be. Both Robert Lindsay (Michael Murray) and Michael Palin (Jim Nelson) performed in ways that we will not see again soon. The wit of the writing was a model of classical characterisation and symbolic plotting. It made us think, even though we were not all thinking the same thing. GBH was about a horrible corrupt country - "a cold land" - where the opposition was dirty and the "intelligence" people filthy and all of us either in it or against it.

Steve Coleman

Further Reading:
From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool

Bar Room Rebels (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The bar-room rebels are very tough - when they talk. And they know how to talk. They have fought a hundred bloody battles in their conversations in the boozer on a Saturday night. With Guinness as their fuel for their tanks they have defeated countless oppressors - at least, they have spoken of doing so.

The bar-room rebels come to life on a Friday night when the pub doors open and the band is tuning up. After a pint or two they speak with passion about injustices which they know to exist. The troops in Ireland and the despicable prison camp at Long Kesh where men are sent without trial before a jury to be tortured and wasted. They are right to be angry - only the politically desensitised are not. The misery caused by racist tyranny in South Africa - the white dictatorship, the torture and murders committed in its name for the sake of "law and order", the willingness of governments to deal with such oppressors. Again, workers are right to be angry. The bosses who are robbing us - we work hard, they grow rich. The idle, parasitic millionaires. And the bar-room rebel downs another pint and concludes that "they're all a bunch of bastards". A common response to the class which exploits us; scientific socialists are not too pure of mind to share such indignant emotions - we would be peculiar revolutionaries if we did not.

The leisure hours of some of the bar-room rebels are one long expression of anger. Every symbol of capitalist oppression is muttered against in endless bitterness, usually preceded by the inappropriate adjective "fucking", and that for some of the bar-room rebels is the beginning and the end of the fight. At best, such behaviour can be described as harmless; it is also politically useless. But that is not the worst of bar-room politics.

Worse still are the theoretical terrorists who are to be found making aggressive verbal noises in the pub. They support the IRA. "Up the Provos", they shout, as if this is some kind of threat to the ruling class. Now let us be clear in understanding two points about the politics of the gun. Firstly, it has nothing to do with liberation. You do not liberate anyone by the tactics of the militarist oppressor. Cetainly, it is theoretically possible that violent struggle will remove British occupation of a part of Ireland, but it is just as sure that once the old oppressors are out the men with the guns will be the new oppressors - the new ruling class. That is the lesson of 1916. Workers who believe in the illusion of national liberation should look at the Irish Republic, where British capitalists have more capital invested in working class exploitation than in the North, and they will see that wars over nationalism lead only to new, but not very different, nations. Secondly, violence is not something to be theorised about. Armchair terrorists are not only mistaken for thinking that freedom will come from the barrel of a gun but they are hypocrites for doing nothing about their conviction.

Not so long ago the Islington branch of The Socialist Party had a debate against a bunch of bar-room rebels called Red Action. Their main speaker argued that winning the war against the British state in the north of Ireland is the key issue in the class struggle, exhibiting a degree of sincerity unusual on the Left. His comrades cheered him when he made his comment and spoke loudly about the important and brave struggle of the Republicans in Ireland. But killing workers is not a theoretical position, it is a practical one. Why don't those who are so eager to cheer when it comes to supporting military violence get in on the act? After all, if socialists genuinely believed that defeating the British army in Ireland was the decisive issue in the class struggle (a nationalistic belief which no socialist could share) we would have an obligation to join the armed struggle. But for the bar-room rebels it is much easier to sing a few nationalistic songs (it is a sight worth seeing: these so-called Red Internationalists sitting in a pub on a Saturday night singing A Nation Once Again) and paint a few slogans on the toilet walls than to go and do what they urge other to do.

The bar-room rebel fight wars with his mouth. The present writer has been told countless times that he is not qualified to speak about Ireland because he was not born there. Such crass reasoning would lead to the conclusion that the Loyalist majority of the North must be most qualified to speak about Ireland because they were born there. Socialists recognise that workers have no country. The bar-room rebels will agree with that view and then talk at length about the nation which is soon to be born out of the heroic military struggle which they are unwilling to join.

Those who offer support to terrorism in resolutions have an obligation to do so on the streets. Socialists refuse to make brave sounding noises which we cannot back up with action. Like the Christian pacifist who declares that "Thou shall not kill . . . unless under orders from Her Majesty's government", the bar-room rebels proclaim that the armed road is the only road - but they'll not be collecting their ammunition this weekend.

Within Trotskyist circles, where insurrection is always just coming up on the agenda (after the expulsion of this or that member) bar-room rebellion is a favourite pastime. They are to be found often, sitting over half pints of lager discussing whether the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers Revolutionary Party will run soviets after the BBC has been taken over in a midnight coup and the Royal Family has been sent to Epping Forest to receive the Nicholas II treatment. Big talk; if words were bullets the millionaires would be trembling. And the bar-room rebel is quite sure of the futility of trying to persuade fellow workers of the need for a new system. The essence of Leninist politics is that workers are too thick to know what socialism is all about. We must be led. So the bar-room rebels persist in their puerile fantasies about Petrograd in 1917, expelling each other as they fight over who will be Lenin and who will be Trotsky. Meanwhile the would-be Stalin never buys a round and takes the minutes.

The odd thing about these bar-room insurrectionists is that (to their credit) if they saw a gun they would faint. Guns and bombs and the sophisticated instruments of murder are sickening, obscene objects, not symbols of human freedom. Armies are necessarily brutal and authoritarian.

The case for political violence is the case against the possibility of working class consciousness. Once workers understand our oppression we can disposssess he ruling class of both the means of violent coercion and the means of wealth production and distribution. The bar-room rebels base their talk about violence on the defeatist belief that the ruling minority will always be bigger than us. Indeed, the capitalist elite might respond to majority socialist revolution with violence. But if they do they will be powerless in the face of the democratic majority. There is no glory in getting killed; as workers, our aim must be to avoid at all costs the possibility of suffering for our class, while ensuring victory for our class.

A recent topic of noise-making for the bar-room rebels is the struggle in South Africa. Socialists are just as sickened and angered by the racist dictatorship of apartheid as are our fellow workers who have come to hate it. It is easy to be sickened and angered, but then what? There is an implicit racist attitude, expressed by some leftists in Britain, both white and black, that violence is the only possible way out of oppression for the African blacks. It is a racist perception because it assumes that persuasion, organisation, democratic action, trade union struggle - these are not to be expected of the black South African. It is based on the racist caricature of the spear-carrying, unthinking "native" who can only win by the rules of the jungle. The bar-room rebels are quite happy to see a bloodbath in South Africa - "it is the only way". But it will not be their blood in the bath. There have been no reports of British leftists going to fight alongside the ANC.

Socialists would not be historically scientific if they did not understand why workers join the IRA, why they join the ANC. The present writer was once told by a comrade in Belfast how after the British troops started beating up and killing Republicans the IRA won more recruits than they had guns. State violence breeds counter-violence. The Socialist Party is not the Liberal Party; we do not sit around tutting at workers for becoming violent. But neither are we opportunist liars who will tell workers that violence will create anything but new rulers. Only the struggle to end capitalism will bring genuine human liberation. And the struggle is easier to win than those in which countless workers have had their lives wasted as they have swallowed nationalist myths and joined the dead heroes.

It is not for socialists to begrudge our fellow workers a few drinks and a bit of shouting on a Saturday night. The bar-room rebel is but a political reflection of the poverty of working class life. Out of the emotional anger of the heated pub debate socialists have been made - and many more will begin to think about politics in the place where workers try to escape and brewers get rich. But to the bar-room rebel we have a warning: you can't romanticise the struggle forever. The need to get rid of this rotten capitalist system is urgent. Sloganising and fighting wars with bar mats and looking for new nations is no solution. And the bar-room rebel knows that it is no solution. Perhaps that is why one or two of them are reading this article.

Steve Coleman

Transition Period To Socialism? (1984)

From the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Engels argued that socialism (or communism, as they called it) could not have been established at any historical time but only when the material conditions for its existence, large-scale industry capable of producing plenty for all, had come into existence. They were well aware that these conditions had only just begun to appear in the 1840s and that they were not then sufficiently developed to have allowed the immediate establishemnt of socialism. The point was specifically made by Engels in reply to another of the questions ("Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?") in his draft for the Communist Manifesto:

"No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity." (Engels, Principles of Communism, Pluto Press, p.13).

In other words, Engels was saying that at that time conditions were not ripe for the establishment of socialism as the forces of production were not sufficiently developed. So what could be done? The Communist Manifesto (at the end of the section "Proletarians and Communists"), as the programme of the German League of Communists in 1848, envisaged the following "transition to communism":
1. An insurrection to establish political democracy which would put effective control of political power into the hands of the wage-working class.

2. The use by the wage-working class of the control of political power thus acquired to:

(i) immediately expropriate the landlord class and sections of the capitalist class with capital invested in banking, transport (railways, ships, canals) and communications (posts, telegraph);
(ii) gradually expropriate the rest of the private capitalist class;
(iii) develop the means of production by setting up and expanding state-owned factories and farms.

3. When all the means of production had been acquired by the state, then classes would have been abolished and the state as an instrument of political rule would disappear; state ownership would give way to common ownership by society as a whole and a classless, moneyless, stateless society would then have come into being.

No indication was given as to how long this "period of revolutionary transformation" as Marx later described it, could be expected to last, but it seems reasonable to conclude that Marx, Engels and the other members of the League of Communists were thinking, in the 1840s, in terms of a longer rather than a shorter period, perhaps even as long as a generation.

So, at this time, Marx and Engels envisaged a longish "transition period" during which there would be, on the one hand, a declining, but at the beginning a fairly considerable, private capitalist sector employing wage-labour and producing commodities and on the other hand, a growing state sector, financed by a state bank, also employing wage-labour and producing commodities in competition with the private sector. Wages, prices, profits, money, banks, taxes, would all continue to exist. There is only one name for such an economic system: capitalism.

In other words, the economy during the proposed transition period would remain capitalist. This was only logical since if socialism was not possible then capitalism could only continue in one form or another. What the League of Communists was proposing, in the absence of the possibility of immediately or even quickly establishing socialism in the 1840s, was a period of up to thirty years of what might be called "proletarian-administered state capitalism".

This programme was completely unrealistic. For not only was the immediate establishment of socialism impossible in the 1840s but so was the coming to power of the wage-working class which was then still numerically weak and politically immature. The proposal for a transition period of state capitalist  development supposedly under working class political control was essentially only an artificial invention thought up by mid-19th century socialists to try to compensate for the fact that, whatever they did, they could not have established a world classless, stateless, moneyless society in their day.

Today, however, this problem no longer exists. The further development of capitalism did eventually create the material basis for world socialist society, as Engels recognised in 1891 when, in contrast to what he said in 1847 about the impossibility of establishing socialism then "at one stroke", he now spoke in terms of socialism being possible "perhaps after a short transition period". In the same introduction to the republication of Marx's 1847 talk on Wage Labour and Capital Engels referred to the technological developments of his day and wrote of the productivity of human labour increasing "day by day to an extent previously unheard of".

Engels was writing in the middle of a period which had been called the second industrial revolution which saw the invention and application to industry and production of the electric motor and the internal combustion engine. These and other technological advances showed that it had become possible to produce enough to eliminate want throughout the world and to satisfy people's needs, as Engels put it, "in ever-increasing fullness". At the same time the imperialist expansion of the European powers into the other continents meant that capitalism had come to embrace the whole world in its system. Then in 1914 came the aptly-named first world war which marked the clear emergence of capitalism as the unchallenged and predominating world system.

From this time on world socialism could have been established at any time, without society passing first through a period of state capitalist development of the means of production. The means of production had become sufficiently developed for society to pass directly from capitalism to socialism, once the political conditions for the establishment of socialism were fulfilled.

In other words, the very concept of a "transition period" has become redundant and can be abandoned.

Adam Buick

Editorial: The Way The World Is (2006)

Editorial from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is sometimes argued that the kind of destitution and abject poverty that existed in the 1930s and earlier is no longer to be found in developed capitalist countries like the UK. Nowadays, the argument goes, workers take holidays abroad, have homes with several TVs and computers, and can spend large parts of their leisure time on shopping expeditions. It is fair to respond to these obervations by making two main kinds of point.

Firstly, that workers are in fact by no means as well off as such a sketch implies. In England alone, for instance, there are a hundred thousand homeless families, few of whom take holidays abroad.

Many migrant workers, here for fruit-picking, earn 70 pounds for a six-day week when various deductions are taken into account (Guardian 5 June). They cannot even afford to buy the strawberries they pick. The UK minimum wage is a mere 5.05 pounds per hour for those over 21, and around a million workers are on the legal minimum - few home computers for them. A couple of years ago, it was claimed by a trade union that employees in British supermarkets would have to work 94 hours a week to earn the national average wage.

So low pay is by no means a thing of the past.

Secondly, how well off workers are in terms of wages is not the whole picture. The insecurity caused by redundancies and the fear of redundancies, the short-term contracts now so widely used, the boring dead-end 'McJobs', the ever-present fear of production being moved to other countries with lower wage rates - all these undermine workers' sense of well-being. Nearly one person in six in Britain is described as depressed, while over a million are mentally ill and receiving incapacity benefit. Such is the stress and hassle of living under capitalism. At the same time hospitals close and trained medical staff are made unemployed, while overall levels of sickness show no sign of decreasing. The amount of debt is also an indication of how badly off workers really are. Eight million people have over 10,000 pounds of unsecured debt (that is, excluding a mortgage); a third of these say that their debt situation has had an adverse effect on their health or relationships. This year perhaps as many as 100,000 people will declare themselves bankrupt as a means of escaping from their financial problems.

Thus it cannot be said that capitalism has raised workers' living standards to a level where they no longer have to concern themselves with how high their wages are or how secure their position in society is. Poverty and worry about the future are built in to capitalism as far as the working class are concerned.

Moreover, if you take a global perspective, you can see that things are even worse. Half the world's population live on less than two dollars a day, and many on far less. Every day one person in five goes hungry. Over a billion people have no reliable water supplies and more than twice that number lack sanitation. Statistics like this can be multiplied for ever: the essential point is that an incredibly large part of the earth's population lead lives of numbing poverty and precariousness.

At the same time, a relatively small number of people are rich beyond the imaginations of ordinary people. A few hundred billionaires own as much wealth as the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.

The inequality which exists under world capitalism is simply breathtaking, and it is increasing: the world has never been so unequal as it is today. Governments exist essentially to defend the interests of the rich and powerful. Wars are fought to serve their interests too, whether to gain access to oil or to deny such access to others, or to open up some area to so-called free trade.

This is the way the world is. But it should not and need not be this way. Instead, the world could be run on Socialist lines, without rich or poor, without wages or money, without countries or governments.

If you think this sounds like a better way of organising things, contact the Socialist Party and see how you can help to bring it about.

Asylum: From Pillar To Post And Back (2006)

From the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not good news for Chu Hua ('At the Bottom of the Heap', February Socialist Standard). She came from China hoping for asylum but her application was turned down and she was forbidden to find a job or claim benefit, which reduced her to living off friends or getting involved in something illegal -  like selling counterfeit DVDs. That was why she appeared in court, threatened with a prison sentence -  which probably persuaded her to take her chances elsewhere by going on the run.

This is where the bad news begins. On 28 May the Crown Court at Guildford sent a 34 year old man called Ling Cheng to prison for six months. Like Chu Hua, he is a rejected asylum seeker from China and, again like her, his offence - for the fourth time - was selling counterfeit DVDs. This case highlighted the uncomfortable fact that the manufacture and selling of illegal DVDs is dominated by organised gangs of Chinese. Gangs which make money in ways which are illegal - in the sense that they don't actually conform to the type of theft and extortion which capitalism thrives on - often assert their territorial or commercial integrity with extreme violence. In other words anyone who does not do as they say or who tries to muscle in on their territory is liable to be subjected to organised punishment beating or even killings. Chu Hua would be desperately vulnerable to that - it was not why she came to England.

Deportation
Worse news for Chu Hua was that when Ling Cheng was in court there was already an order that he should be deported back to China (although luckily for him the Chinese government had refused to take him, which means he had avoided a fate even worse than trying to scrape a livelihood in England out of nothing). If Chu Hua were also sent back to China she could well be tortured or executed. Her asylum application was based on the fact that she is a member of the Fa Lun Gong cult, which the Chinese government regards as dangerously subversive of their style of capitalism and of the discipline they need to impose on their workers if that country is to maintain its bid to become one of the great competitors of world capitalism. This is why members of Fa Lun Gong have been imprisoned, beaten and killed.

As if this is not menacing enough for Chu Hua, there has recently been some news about the Chinese government's keen interest in the profit prospects of the international trade in human organs -  and the lengths they are willing to go to in order to get a slice of the market. There is a world shortage of some transplant organs and plenty of desperately sick people who will pay a great deal for one. A kidney costs around u35,000, a heart about u80,000. Among the organisations which openly advertise their wares there are transplant centres in China running websites which promise to supply most organs quickly - a kidney can be had within four weeks, some viscera almost immediately. Perhaps the people whose lives depend on a quick transplant will not ask themselves too many searching questions about the origins of the organ they are buying and why it should be available so quickly. For them, a recent statement by the British Transplant Society should have made disturbing reading:

"an accumulating body of evidence suggests that the organs of executed prisoners are being removed for transplantation without the prior consent of either the prisoner or their family."

Executions
Professor Stephen Wigmore, who is chairman of the British Transplant Society's ethics committee, has referred to "a reported close relationship between transplant units and the authorities regulating executions and the availability of organs" in China and says that "The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it's really incontrovertible in our opinion". He told BBC Radio Five Live that the speed with which patients and donors in China are matched must imply that prisoners were being selected before execution to give up their organs. Motoring enthusiasts may see some similarities between this and their expectation of popping down to the local breaker's yard to buy a salvaged part for a damaged car.

The government of China lays claim to it being a socialist country. Leaving aside the fact that this is a contradiction in terms, the truth is that that country exhibits some of the crueller, more repressive characteristics of life under capitalism. It is common for prisoners in China to be subjected to the humiliation and terror of a public sentencing rally. Of all the countries where the death sentence operates China is easily the most active; according to Amnesty International 3,400 people were executed there in 2005 - about 90 per cent of the total world wide. (Iran was in second place, a long way behind with 160). The number of executions in China can only be estimated as it is an official state secret. Some judge it to be far higher than Amnesty, for example one delegate at the National People's Congress put the figure nearer 10,000. In addition there is an unusually wide definition of capital crime, encompassing corruption and repeat instances of minor, or attempted, offences.

Terror
That definition also includes membership of the Fa Lun Gong, which the Chinese government is trying to wipe out. Supporters of the Fa Lun Gong say that members of the cult have been held at a labour camp near a town called Shenyang before being put to death so that their organs could be sold. It was to escape this kind of terror that Chu Hua made her way to England and eventually to the court where she was under threat of imprisonment for selling those DVDs - an offence which in China would almost certainly have resulted in her being executed. She went on the run from the court a few months ago and seems to be still at large. Perhaps she decided that after all she would be better off back in China. Either way it is not good news for her or for the people of the world, who are capable of organising human affairs much better than this.

Ivan

Issac Rabinowich and the World Socialist Party of the United States (2006)

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the formation of the World Socialist Party of the United States, companion party of the World Socialist Movement in the United States. Printed below is a biographical article on one of its founding members, Issac Rab, which I've reproduced because I think it provides an interesting commentary on the history of radical politics in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, and also because I hope it goes some way in shedding light on the marxian socialist tradition in the United States.

90 Years On

The Party now known as the World Socialist Party of the United States was formed, in Detroit, in July 1916. Probably its most enthusiastic founder-member was Isaac Rabinowich, generally called Rab for short. His granddaughter and long time member of the WSP, Karla Rab Ellenbogen, has just written and published Role-Modeling Socialist Behavior: A Biography of Isaac Rab, which also contains a selection of Rab's letters and articles, as well as a report on his visit to Britain in 1954 and a tape-recorded address to the SPGB. annual conference in 1959.

Rab's parents, Sheppie and Sara Rabinowich, came from Navaradok in Minsk-Gobernia, on the Russian-Polish border. Sheppie's father and grandfathers for many generations had been rabbis; and Sheppie also studied to be a rabbi, but then decided that it was irrational to believe in a god. He gave up being a rabbi, and became a lay teacher. In August 1893, Sheppie and Sara, who was already pregnant, arrived in Boston in the United States, and on December 22 had a son whom they named Isaac.

Sara was, even before emigrating to America, the pioneer revolutionary socialist in the family. Almost immediately after arriving in the United States, Sheppie joined the Socialist Labor Party, and then with its formation, the reformist Socialist Party of America. He later became a charter member of the Communist Party, although neither Sara nor their son fell for Bolshevism. In 1909 at the age of 16, Isaac Rab joined the Socialist Party of America, and served as the Boston Locals secretary until he left in 1912.

In 1915, Rab moved to Detroit, Michigan, and as soon as he arrived joined the Detroit Local of the SPA. Detroit was a boom town with auto plants attracting workers not only from other areas of the USA, but also from Canada and Great Britain. Among them at that time were members of the Socialist Party of Canada and of Great Britain, including Tom Bolt, Bill Davenport, Adolph Kohn and Moses Baritz. As elsewhere, the reformers in the Detroit Local of the SPA predominated, but the revolutionary minority drew encouragement from the new reinforcements and socialist literature, as well as the International Socialist Review published by Charles H. Kerr & Co.

Rab soon heard about a Marxist study class conducted by Moses Baritz and Adolph Kohn in Duffield Hall. He immediately joined. And soon after rejected the majority reformism of the SPA. Rab also met, and became friendly with John Keracher, the Michigan State Secretary of the SPA, who originally came from Scotland. Karla Rab Ellenbogen relates that, in April 1916, at a lecture in Duffield Hall with a friend, Bob Reynolds, Rab "couldn't pull his eyes away" from the girl taking the collection a little way down the aisle from them. It was love at first sight. Her name was Ella Riebe. Rab was introduced to her.. "I'm going to marry that girl," Rab told Reynolds. And on September 27, 1916, Ella and Isaac were married.

The revolutionists within the Michigan SPA felt that a new political party was needed, in the words of the SPGB declaration of principles, "determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist...". Keracher largely agreed, but with Dennis Batt decided to remain in the 5PA for the time being. On July 7, 1916, however, 43 members of the Duffield Hall study group, including Rab and 18 other members of the Detroit Local, formed the Socialist Party of the United States. They included Bill Davenport, who became the first secretary, Lawrence Beardsley, George Ramsay, Walter Green and Bill Gribble, the first organizer (although not mentioned by Karla, Gribble had been an active member of the Socialist Party of Canada). Ella joined later. Shortly after, the Socialist Party of America challenged the new partys right to use the name, and Workers Socialist Party was substituted. The WSP adopted the object and declaration of principles of the SPGB. On August 11, 1917, Ella gave birth to a boy who was named Willie.

Following the Bolshevik coup d'état in Russia, writes Karla Rab Ellenbogen, "the socialists in the new Workers Socialist Party were sneered at for their failure to recognize a socialist revolution when it took place". And she adds: "To their credit, the WSP comrades saw that there was no conscious, political majority of convinced socialists in Russia; any revolution there could only lead to the establishment of a capitalist government."

Faced with a hostile political climate, of government repression against "reds", anarchists, radicals and socialists, the WSP membership had to make a hard decision. Without changing its principles, it decided in 1919 to abandon the structure of a political party, and re-group as the Detroit Socialist Education Society, generally referred to as the SES. In 1921 it changed its name again to the Marxian Club. In April, 1920, Ella Rab gave birth to another baby, whom they named Anna Hope. Rab, who was working for Ford, was warned that he was not to propagate socialist ideas in the factory, and was then blacklisted. In the same year, the family moved back to Boston.

In Boston, there were no members of the socialist movement. So, in the words of Karla, "Rab had resumed the task begun in Detroit, his lifelong work of spreading knowledge and understanding of the case for socialism, almost as soon as he got back to Boston." He was a charismatic speaker and soon drew large audiences wherever he spoke. Meanwhile, an active socialist group, the Socialist Educational Society, had been formed in New York, comprising former members of the SPGB and SPC, as well as others such as Sam Orner, the taxi driver immortalised by Clifford Odets in the play Waiting for Lefty.

In 1927, Rab and Ella, and their two children, marched in the funeral parade for Sacco and Vanzetti, the two anarchists executed by the state "for a murder of which they were patently innocent", writes Karla Rab Ellenbogen in her biography of her grandfather. (Charlie Lestor was also there - PEN).

Shortly after, Rab took charge of the Vagabonds, an athletic club which, in the words of Karla, "played a role in the growth of the socialist movement in Boston that no one could have anticipated". The Vagabonds was not just an athletics club, but encouraged discussions of science, history, anthropology and, under Rab's influence, socialism. Some members of the Vagabonds formed a Science Club, a number of whom became active in the socialist movement in Boston. In 1929, Rab and a number of his comrades were able to form a Socialist Study Class which moved into International Hall, which, incidentally, was also the headquarters of the local Communist Party. With increasing activities in Boston, New York and Detroit, the members of the various classes, clubs and groups voted to once again become the Workers' Socialist Party of the United States. Rab continued to soapbox at various locations in Boston. And by 1931, he was joined by a well-known, top-notch local tennis player by the name of George Gloss. As Karla notes, George Gloss was to play a major role in the history and development of the WSP.

In November, 1933, the Boston Local of the WSP had just 12 members. By 1939, it had around a 100. The Local moved into the WSP headquarters at 12 Hayward Place; and members spoke regularly on Boston Common. In 1940, Karla was born to Rab's daughter Anna and a young socialist, Lenny Feinzig. At the beginning of the Second World War, the WSP issued its anti-war manifesto, calling on the workers to establish socialism, and "put a speedy end to the profit system that breeds wars...". Unfortunately they did not.

In 1946, the Boston Local was forced to move to another headquarters at 27 Dock Square. This put quite a strain on the membership. Karla's grandmother, Ella, was the Locals secretary at the time. Rab was the National Organizer. In 1946-1947, there were at least a 100 active socialists in Boston. It was at this time that the Workers Socialist Party decided that it must change its name, largely because of the confusion caused by a Trotskyist group calling itself the Socialist Workers Party. Although many members of the WSP were reluctant to give up the old name, a majority, in a referendum voted for the party to be called the World Socialist Party of the United States. Rab said in later years that it had been a fortuitous choice, as it emphasized the international nature of the socialist movement.

By the 1950s, the WSP began to lose some of its often most active members. There were a number of controversies. Karla comments: "The material conditions were simply not conducive to a general desire for social change as they had been during the Depression. The American working-class were disinterested in socialism during the post-war years. McCarthyism was on the rise. It was a discouraging time for socialists." The National Office was moved from Boston to Detroit in 1950. The McCarthy witch hunts made it particularly difficult for not just "Communists", but also socialists and the WSP. Nevertheless, a much smaller party carried on. In September, 1954, Rab and George Gloss visited the United Kingdom. Indeed, this writer met Rab and heard him and George Gloss speak to a large and attentive audience one sunny Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park.

By the early 1970s, Isaac Rab began to age, although he continued to be active in the party. In December, 1975, there was, writes Karla, a huge celebration for Rab's 80th birthday. Hundreds of people came. Ella Rab died in 1979. And Rab began to suffer from Alzheimers disease. He died on December 31, 1986. The World Socialist Party, of course, carried on. In fact, "Eventually, members in other parts of the country who had thought the WSP was no more, found the party again", notes Karla Rab Ellenbogen. The World Socialist Party continues the struggle, 90 years on.

Peter E. Newell

Further information on the WSPUS and its history are available at the following links:
World Socialist Party of the United States MySpace Page
A Brief History of the WSPUS (dating from 1966 on its 50th anniversary)

Wage Slavery (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some people don't like the term "wage slavery". It's not nice to be called a slave. They think you're insulting them and they might want to smack you in the eye. Other people recognise how accurate a phrase it is. They get all bitter and maudlin about their "wasted life". They normally want to smack their boss in the eye. (The boss, unconcerned, smacks his lips and carries on counting).

But "wage-slavery" is what we are in, whether we admit it or not - even those accountants in their fancy cars are only a few months from the breadline if their boss decides to dispense with their services, as well they realize. For the kind of money they're on, they've got to pull out all the stops. The family? Leave it to the wife. Interests? Two hours on Sunday and be thankful for that. Peace? Relaxation? Self-determination? Forget it.

Wage-slavery is a condition of capital and of capitalism. Capitalism itself is, you might say, the latest refinement of a popular illusion that there is something called "ownership" and something else called "property", rather in the same way that there is something called "gravity" and something else called "weight". As long as we accept the illusion that this is a physical law, then we are also obliged to accept the working conditions, to say nothing of all the other catastrophes we keep meaning to join Greenpeace, etc, etc supposedly to prevent.

Well-adjusted people take it philosophically. After all, if you were sent to prison for forty years without parole your best strategy would be to learn to like it. Look on the bright side. Things could be worse. At least I get fed. At least I've a roof over my head.

If you don't like being a wage-slave but you aren't rich enough to have other options it's a bit tough. Bad for stress. That attitude won't get you anywhere. Don't let the boss catch you talking like that.

It seems to me that there is such a thing as collaborating against yourself, like a Quisling in your own personal Class War. It's as if by some awesome mental self-deceit you can trick and trip into reverse the normal emotional process, with the result that employed work becomes life itself and you the employeee come to define and subjugate you the person. You con yourself into thinking you are doing something useful and worthwhile with your life, whereas in reality you are keeping some capitalist's books for him and nothing more. Thus, you live to work rather than work to live. It's not really a matter of cheap fuck-you-Jack materialism either, even if some people do dribble and slobber over fast cars occasionally. "You've got to work", they would argue, "you might as well enjoy it". So every morning, bright and early, you get up and shoot the resistance fighter in yourself and lace up the jackboots.

Nope, can't do it. I can't learn to love wage-slavery. I do think it's a prison, and I think of the Socialist Party as a somewhat understaffed Escape Committee. But I've emulated the capitalists and adopted sound business principles in selling my skills - we agree on eight hours, they pay for seven hours, I give them six and hope they don't notice. As for the solitary confinement of the dole, that's hardly an improvement.

I know there are a hell of a lot of workers out there who feel exactly like I do, but they either won't admit it or aren't saying anything for fear of being labelled a bad worker. Their attitude can be summed up as "OK, so it's all bullshit, but you've got to play the game."

The thing which really pisses me off is that if I object to the terms of this "game" I'm told by the likes of Michael "Mr Shithouse" Portaloo or Blue Peter Lilley that it's because I'm just a lazy feckless git who won't get out of bed to do a decent day's hard graft. This is true, in a way. Most of the "hard graft" which is on offer I wouldn't cross the road for, except maybe to avoid. But that doesn't mean I don't like money at all. I simply dislike employment on someone else's terms.

Let me have the sort of work I can see a useful point in, in which I have a say, which I can enter into freely and without obligation, which is creative, which I can take a pride in, which I can do when I want and stop if I want, which I change when I like to something else I want to try. With half the world starving and the planet poisoned it's not as if there isn't anything useful that needs doing. It's my body and my labour, after all. Why the hell shouldn't it be me that decides when and where to apply it? Money doesn't even come into it. That sort of work I would do for nothing if I could, and what's more if you're honest about it, so would you. Without "property" fetish, that is how socialism would be able to do things. But that's not how it is, and in this stick-and-carrot society, we've got there is no real opportunity, for most of us, to find this kind of work. Employment is for the most part a dreary, oppressive, soul-destroying way of paying the rent and the food bills, but it's the only game in town until we decide to change the rules.

So we carry on playing the game. Some of us even manage to like it. But we might as well recognize that we, the working class, are not holding any of the boss cards. We're not supposed to, because this is a game devised by the owning class which we cannot ever win. Therefore, we must kick the table over once and for all.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Baron Rothschild rides again (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the Times (13 May), the Rothschild dynasty is to invest again in Black Sea oil from which they were ejected after the Bolshevik coup in 1917. In the 19th century the Rothschilds were often regarded as the archetypal capitalists. To be honest, this wasn't entirely free from anti-semitism. Even Paul Lafargue, who was married to one of Marx's daughters, was not immune from this.

But if, as the pre-WWI German Social Democrat August Bebel remarked, "anti-semitism is the socialism of the fool", then a leading contender for the prize of biggest fool must go to the anarchist and comic opera revolutionist Bakunin who wrote in one of his polemics against Marx:

 
I am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschilds appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschilds. This may seem strange. What could there be in common between communism and high finance? Ho ho! The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labour of people - will always find the means for its existence (quoted, Polemique contre les Juifs, 1872).

On the other hand, F. A. Sorge, who was one of Marx's correspondents in America, recounted the following anecdote concerning a member of the dynasty:

  
One day in 1848, as the story goes, Baron Rothschild took a walk on the Common of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Two labourers met him and accosted him thus: 'Baron, you are a rich man; we want to divide with you.' Baron Rothschild, not the least puzzled, took out his purse good-humouredly and answered: 'Certainly! We can do that business on the spot. The account is easily made. I own 40 millions of florins; there are 40 millions of Germans. Consequently each German has to receive one florin; here is your share;' and giving one florin to each of the labourers, who looked at their money quite confused, he walked off smiling" (Quoted here).

The point Sorge was making is still valid. Bill Gates could behave in the same way today. One estimate of his personal wealth is $100 billion. The world's population is about 6.5 billion. So, if similarly accosted, the amount he would give would be $15. Even if only the US population was concerned they'd get only $333 each.

Contrary to a widespread belief, socialism is not about equal sharing or redistributing wealth more evenly. Its about the common ownership of the means of wealth production. Which is a different proposition altogether. These means are already a single integrated network operated collectively by the whole working class, but they are owned separately, whether by rich individuals, capitalist corporations or states. Its not a question of dividing them or their monetary value up amongst the population but of making them the common property of all.

On this basis they can be used to turn out what people require to satisfy their needs and to which everyone can have access to satisfy those needs in accordance with the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs". Because people's needs are different so will be what they take and use. But everyone will have an equal right to satisfy their different needs. Thats what socialism means, not sharing out the wealth of Bill Gates, the Rothschilds or other wealthy individuals.

On The Revolutionary Road (2005)

Film Review from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Motorcycle Diaries

It's become a common practice to give directors grammatical ownership of a film regardless of how much input they have. So we have Hitchcock's The Birds, Anderson's If, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, as well as Polanski's Macbeth and Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. Directors, like managers, are important to some extent, but most people know that when the boss is off the firm runs just as well, if not better. The practice of elevating the director to a position of supreme importance relegates to inconsequential roles the hundreds of other workers involved in a production. To make a film without a director would be difficult; to make one without engineers, musicians, caterers and cleaners would be impossible.

Such hierarchical structures have dominated society for so long that they appear natural and permanent, and revolutionary action has succeeded only to replace one hierarchy with another. Struggles for communism become struggles for fairer capitalism, as the experience of Latin America shows. Its turbulent recent history has produced a gallery of memorable radicals, but in terms of cult status there are few to compare with Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries, of which the director Walter Salles was one of the many workers involved in its making, concerns the early life of one of the 20th century's most charismatic rebels and whose image has become one of its most enduring icons.

Set in 1952, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado take off on a 1939 Norton for a tour of South America intending to bring medical relief (they are both doctors) to the needy, and sexual relief to their own needy libidos. But the exuberance and exhilaration of single young men high-tailing it around foreign countries is balanced by the need to do good beyond the remit of the Hippocratic oath which we see developing in the 23-year-old Guevara as the journey progresses. As the real Che explained in On Revolutionary Medicine: 'I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease I began to realise that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous I wanted to help those people.'

Where medicine cannot help, Guevara offers money, moral support and brutal honesty. On behalf of dispossessed peasants he throws stones and hurls abuse. For the sick of the leper colony where he briefly works, he swims the river that separates them from the healthy whilst battling against currents and his own asthma. This is Che the champion of the downtrodden, the challenger of injustice, the idol in the making. Consequently, the film itself is fertilised with the concerns of its hero and a message begins to form. This becomes clear at the end when a montage of South Americas working and peasant class is displayed in a vividness only monochrome can achieve. These people are still with us, the film seems to say. There is still work to be done.

Fortunately the film has no anachronisms which refer to Guevara's later status or appearance; no scenes with him in a department store plumping for the beret or trying on a pair of Cuban heels. Joy and misery are lucidly brought to life in a film that can be enjoyed even if you are one of the few people who has never heard of Che Guevara.

There are as few things to say about the cult of Guevara as there are about the cult of the director. Both reinforce the notion that socio-cultural events are made only by powerful individuals rather than by the thousands of workers who truly make history. Perhaps it is time we donned our berets, put on our army boots and proclaimed in sonorous tones: Workers of the film industry unite!

Neil Windle

What Marx Should Have Said To Kropotkin (1994)

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Adam Buick to the 1994 Socialist Party of Great Britain Summer School, which was held that year  at Ruskin College in Oxford, England.

I once read a book which contained a sentence which began "As Marx said to Lenin ..." This would not have been a physical impossibility, as Marx's life and Lenin's life did overlap for 13 years. But quite why - and how - Marx would have confided his political views to a schoolboy in provincial Russia was not explained. In short, it never happened nor was it plausible to imagine it could have happened.

Marx-Kropotkin meeting on the other hand, though it never did happen, could well have. Kropotkin was born in 1842, Marx in 1818 so, although Marx was a generation older, they could have met and discussed (just as Marx had in fact met and discussed with the three founding fathers of modern anarchism, Proudhon, Bakunin and Max Stirner).

If Marx and Kropotkin had have met, it could have been on two occasions: in 1876-7 when Kropotkin arrived in England after making a dramatic and well-publicised escape from a Russian prison, or in 1880-1 when Kropotkin again lived in England for a while (before going to France - and ending up in a French prison).

As a matter of fact, I think Marx would have been quite keen to have met Kropotkin on both these occasions. In the last years of his life (he was to die in 1883. aged 65) Marx took a great interest in Russia. He had always seen Tsarist Russia as a threat to democratic, let alone socialist advance in Western Europe and was interested in the prospects of an anti-Tsarist revolution there. He learned Russian and began to study in detail its history and social and political structure.

Kropotkin's reputation during Marx's lifetime was not so much as an anarchist but as a Russian revolutionary with socialist leanings and as a geographer and explorer. Kropotkin came from a very privileged background. A member of the old Moscow aristocracy and a hereditary prince, he had been enrolled in the elite corps of pages, a military academy that supplied personal assistants to the Tsar. He had himself been the Tsar's personal page for a while, but when it came to choosing which regiment to be an officer in he opted not for some prestigious one but for a regiment of Cossacks in Siberia a first sign that he was becoming disillusioned with the Tsarist regime. In Siberia, where he did his exploring and geological studies, his liberal sentiments grew turning in revolutionary ones, especially after a visit to Switzerland in 1872/3 where he joined the IWMA (International Working Mens Association, or First International). On his return to Russia he became involved in a revolutionary circle, of the "go to the people" variety rather than the conspiracies to assassinate Tsarist officials and even the Tsars that later developed. He got arrested and was imprisoned, escaping, as I have mentioned, in 1876.

Marx would have loved to have met such a person and to have discussed with him the prospects for an anti-Tsarist revolution and for socialism in Russia including the Russian peasant commune (or mir). But the title of this talk is not "What Marx Would Have Said to Kropotkin". but what "Marx Should Have Said to Kropotkin". So what, then, should Marx have said?

Three things:

1. "Don't call me a State Socialist! I was putting forward a case for abolishing the State while you were still a toddler".
2. "With regard to paying people in labour-time vouchers in the early days of Socialist society, you were right and I was wrong. This was a silly, unworkable idea".
3. "Like me. You're a Socialist. We both want a stateless, moneyless, wageless society. Why then do you feel you have more in common with non-socialist opponents of the State than with me? After all, your disagreement with them is over ends, while you're disagreement with me is only over means".

Marx
Most people in this room will already know either from reading Marx themselves or from hearing the arguments that Marx was not what in the 1880s and 1890s was called a "State Socialist" but that, on the contrary, he was what might be called a "no-State Socialist". This, however, is not what most people out there, including many otherwise well-informed people, think. The myth of Marx the Statist is widely accepted, as a result, it has to be said, not just of his critics but also of many (perhaps even most) of those who have regarded themselves as his supporters.

But it is a myth and one that I'd like to begin by demolishing. The French marxologist, Maximilien Rubel, in an article first published in 1973 entitled "Marx: Theorist of Anarchism" has even argued that Marx was one of the pioneers of modern anarchism! I'm not sure I'd want to call Marx an anarchist without qualification, but I think a strong case can be made out for seeing Marx as the first person to put forward a full theory of no-state communism. Marx was, if you like, the first coherent and consistent theorist of an anarchist communist society. The quotes that I'll be using to show this are mostly taken from Rubel's article.

Marx became a Socialist, or Communist as it was then known and as Marx generally described himself, sometime in 1843. Before that he had been a simple Democrat and active as the editor of a Cologne newspaper financed by the radical section of the Rhineland capitalists and which advocated political democracy for Prussia (which governed the Rhineland) and Germany generally.

At this time Marx accepted the view of the then dominant school of political thought in Germany that of Hegel that the State was a higher realm of human activity than the realm of everyday economic activity ("civil society"). This was because, whereas in their everyday economic activity humans were acting in their own individual selfish interest (as they had to, to survive), the State was the realm in which they pursued the common good, the general interest of all. So the State in concrete terms, the law-making and law-enforcing institutions of society (the government, the parliament, the courts, the army, the police, prisons) was seen as representing the interests of the community as a whole. As indeed it still generally is seen.

Actually. Hegel was a great deal more philosophical than this, speaking of the State as the embodiment of reason, etc. He also saw the existing Protestant Christian Kingdom of Prussia as filling this role. But Marx and the group of Young Hegelians to which he then belonged argued that the State would not become the representative of the whole community until and unless all its citizens had an equal say in its decision-making processes, until, in other words, it had become a Democratic State.

When Marx became a Communist and came to reject individualism as the regulating principle of everyday economic life his perspective altered. The establishment of Communism would mean that it would be the realm of everyday economic activity that would become the realm in which humans pursued the common interest they would no longer be individuals trying to make an independent living in conflict with all others trying to do the same, but members of a real community cooperating to meet their needs. This meant that there would no longer be any need for another, separate and superior, realm of activity in which the common interest was pursued. There was no need, in other words, for a State.

In fact, once he had become a Communist Marx came to see the State as a false (or at least only a very partial) community and as a realm that only needed to exist where individualism was the regulating principle of everyday life. It was an institution that was only needed, and only arose, out of such conditions, in order to restrain economic individualism in case it should tear society apart.

Marx expressed these views in the first article he wrote after becoming a Socialist/Communist published in 1844 and called "On the Jewish Question". This was the question of whether or not Jews who did not convert to Christianity should be granted political and civil rights (in Prussia at that time only Christians could vote, be civil servants, army officers, etc). Naturally. Marx argued "yes", but went on to argue that "political emancipation", or the establishment of a Democratic State with equal political rights, for all, did not amount to full human emancipation.

Political emancipation and a Democratic State, he pointed out had been achieved in the US but humans there were still not in conscious control of their destiny as their lives were still dominated by money and the need to acquire it to survive. Human emancipation, could only be achieved in a communist society where needs would be satisfied directly without having to go through the medium of money. Such a moneyless, communist society would not require a State, not even a democratic one, since there would then no longer be any need for a separate, political realm in which the general interest was pursued this would be being done directly at the level of everyday life.

As Marx put it in the philosophical terms in which he then expressed himself:

"Man must recognise his own forces as social forces, organise them, and thus no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be complete" ( Jewish Question, 1844. Early Texts, p. 108).

So, what Marx was advocating was a society without money and without a State an anarchist communist society, if you like. And this remained his goal for the rest of his life, as a few quotes will confirm:

"The existence of the State and the existence of slavery are inseparable" (1844 article, Early Texts, p. 213).

"[The proletarians] find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State" (1845, German Ideology, p. 85).

Particularly significant is what he wrote in 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy. This is a criticism of the economic views of Proudhon, the man who is regarded by Anarchists as the founder of modern anarchism. Proudhon wanted a society without government, a society he called "Anarchy". However, he was not a Socialist or Communist but an advocate of various cranky financial reforms in the context of a completely free market economy. In fact he was a bitter opponent of Communism as he believed that this would immensely increase the power of the government and turn people into State slaves (the common bourgeois objection to communism at the time.

So it is very relevant how Marx dealt with Proudhon's views. Naturally, he shows that a free market economy based on free credit is not the answer. Communism is, but Marx underlines that this will be a society without a State:

"Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No ... The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society" (Poverty of Philosophy, 1847. Pp 196-7).

Exactly the same point is made in the 1848 Communist Manifesto:

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of the associated individuals, the public power will lose its political character" (1848 Communist Manifesto, p. 81).

After the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 Marx was called upon to write what amounted to an obituary for it on behalf of the General Council of the IWMA. He wrote various drafts for this statement which was published under the title The Civil War in France. In one of these drafts Marx wrote:

"This was, therefore, a Revolution not against this or that, Legitimate, Constitutional, Republican or Imperialist form of State Power. It was a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist Abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling class to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Class-domination itself" (p. 166).

This was an exaggerated description of what the Paris Commune was about (it was not the attempted socialist revolution that this suggests) and it was no doubt because of this that Marx did not include this passage in the final version. But it does show very clearly that Marx thought that the socialist revolution had to be a revolution against the State, not a revolution to establish a more powerful, centralised State.

I only want to give one more quote from Marx but a very significant one as in it he uses the actual word "Anarchy". In the course of the dispute that broke out in the IWMA after the suppression of the Paris Commune, Bakunin circulated a document in which he claimed Marx stood for a new State in which a new ruling class of ex-workers would rule over the mass of workers who would remain exploited and oppressed. Marx wrote some notes in the margin of his copy of Bakunin's pamphlet. Some are just words like "idiot" and "ass" but others are more substantial, including the following:

"All Socialists understand by "anarchy" this: the aim of the proletarian movement, the abolition of classes, once achieved, then the power of the State, which serves to keep the great producing majority under the yoke of a small exploiting minority, will disappear and the functions of government will be transformed into simple administrative functions"(1874).

Here Marx is saying, in explicit terms, that the communist society he sees as the aim of the working class movement is to be a no-state, no-government society. Here Marx is proclaiming himself to be an . . . . anarchist communist. Eight years before Kropotkin.

Kropotkin
There can be no doubt that Kropotkin was a Socialist in the sense we use the term. In fact he probably did more than any other well-known 18th century Socialist to promote the idea that Socialism means not just a stateless but also a moneyless and wageless society a society where the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" would apply fully, where individuals would have free access to goods and services according to their own self-defined needs and without rationing of any kind. Kropotkin, in fact, always regarded himself as a Socialist and always called himself a Socialist.

Here, for instance, is what he wrote in an article in an English magazine in 1887:

"Common possession of the necessaries for production implies common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organisation of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned, and when everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs "(1887, Anarchism Communism: Its Basis and Principles, p. 59).

The Swiss Jura Federation of the IWMA adopted "complete communism" as its aim in 1880. Previously it had stood for the common ownership of all productive resources but for a person's share in consumer goods and services to be proportional to the number of hours of work they had performed. Kropotkin and others criticised this as being only "incomplete" or "partial" communism and argued that a consistent communism implies free consumption according to individual needs as well as common ownership.

At this time Kropotkin (like many others) felt that capitalism could not last into the 20th century and that therefore a socialist resolution was more or less imminent. His articles from this periods (1880s) all advocate that the aim of this revolution should not be the formation of a revolutionary government nor the institution of a so-called "Workers State" (he actually used the term) but the immediate establishment of full communism.When a number of his articles from this period were collected together and published (in French, the language he wrote them in, though from 1886 he resided permanently in England till returning to Russia in 1917 after the overthrow of the Tsar) in 1892, Kropotkin gave the book the title The Conquest of Bread. This well sums up what he thought the revolution should be all about: not about conquering political power and setting up a new political regime (as had happened many times in France without altering the position of the majority of the people), but about meeting the immediate consumption needs for food, clothing and shelter of the impoverished majority. To this end. he advocated that all food, clothes and houses in areas won by the revolution should be put into a common pool to which every member of the oppressed class should have free access according to their basic needs.

The words Kropotkin used for "free access" were (in French) "pris au tas", literally "taking from the pile" or, colloquially, "help yourself, take what you need". If this wasn't done, said Kropotkin, then the Revolution would have failed. It has to be said, however, that Kropotkin's conception of the form the Revolution would take was somewhat old-fashioned, even for his days: a series of town risings on the lines of the Paris Commune of 1871.

One of the articles that later appeared in The Conquest of Bread was called "The Wage System" (written in 1888, it appeared as a pamphlet in English in 1889). In my opinion, it is the best refutation that has been written of the idea of Labour Time Vouchers an idea, of course, that Marx somewhat unwisely endorsed in his 1875 comments on the Gotha programme of the German Social Democrats. Kropotkin's criticism was not in fact specifically aimed at Marx (he couldn't have known what Marx's views on the subject were since Marx's comments had not been made public at the time Kropotkin was writing). It was aimed at all those, including some anarchists as well as the German Social Democrats, who advocated the use of Labour Time Vouchers (LTVs), labour certificates, labour checks, labour chits, labour money, labour notes as they were variously called, to regulate consumption in a Socialist society.

Kropotkin put forward two simple, but effective arguments.

First, that it just didn't make sense to try to measure an individual's contribution to production. This was impossible since production was not (or no longer) individual, but was cooperative and social. All the workers in a particular factory or mine contributed to the product, but only as a group, not individually. In fact, in the end all that is produced is the result of the collective work effort of all the producers in all farms, mines, factories, transport, services, etc. So:

"No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measured them by hours of labour leads to absurdity also. One course remains: not to measure them at all, but to recognise the right of all who take part in productive labour first of all to live - and then to enjoy the comforts of life" (1888, The Wage System, p. 10).

Kropotkin's second argument was that, in any event, and even if production had still been individual, it still wouldn't be fair to ration a person's consumption by the number of hours worked. Because the skills they would be using would have been acquired only through society they weren't born with them, but were benefiting from the experience of countless past generations. And the towns and factories they worked in, as well as the general level of education and culture, were likewise the result of the work of past generations. So:

"A society that has seized upon all social wealth, and has plainly announced that all have a right to this wealth, whatever may be the part they have taken in creating it in the past, will be obliged to give up all idea of wages, either in money or in labour notes" (1888. The Wage System, p.8).

What Kropotkin was claiming was that to use LTVs to regulate consumption would be to retain the wages system.

If people are to be given labour vouchers to regulate consumption, this implies that goods and services have to be given labour-time "prices". I've got the word "prices" in inverted commas in my notes but I could as well have left them out, as it is clear that the LTV system does imply problems of supply and demand, inflation, devaluation, etc, even taxes, just like the ordinary monetary system does.

When he endorsed LTVs Marx never said anything about this, though he had done earlier when he had discussed and dismissed as unworkable various schemes that had been put forward for introducing labour money under capitalism. What he failed to realise was that many of his objections also applied to the use of LTVs in Socialism. LTVs were, or would rapidly have become, labour money and we'd be back to buying and selling and capitalism.

It was Kropotkin's merit to have seen this and to have denounced the LTV system as nonsense a criticism of course which we have long taken on board.

Kropotkin was also able to see that because they didn't really aim at abolishing the wages system, groups like the German Social Democrats stood not for socialism, but for State capitalism. In fact Kropotkin must have been one of the first to use this term, as for instance in his autobiography Memoirs of A Revolutionist that first appeared in 1899. And in one of another series of articles later published (in 1913) in Modern Science and Anarchism:

"We entirely differ from all the sections of state socialists in that we do not see in the system of state capitalism, which is now preached under the name of collectivism, a solution to the social question. We see in the organisation of the posts and telegraphs, in the State railways, and the like which are represented as illustrations of a society without capitalists nothing but a new, perhaps improved, but still undesirable form of the wage system" (1913, Modern Science and Anarchism, p. 170).

"Anarchism cannot see in the next coming revolutions a mere exchange of monetary symbols for labor-checks, or an exchange of present capitalism for state-capitalism" (p.195).

So, as I said, if Marx had met Kropotkin he ought to have conceded that he was wrong on labour-time vouchers and that Kropotkin was right.

Of course Marx could have said that, in the end, there is no point in discussing now how goods should be distributed in the early days of Socialism, since that will have to depend on how much there was to distribute at the time of the socialist revolution. In fact this is what he did say. Kropotkin was fully aware of this and one of the themes of the Conquest of Bread was to show that enough food, clothing and shelter already existed, or could very rapidly be brought into existence, to satisfy people's needs for them. He knew that his call for the revolution to bring in full communism immediately depended on this being the case, and he used his scientific approach and knowledge to demonstrate that it was. This was also the theme of his other book Fields, Factories and Workshops, the first edition of which came out in 1899. Whereas the assumption in the Conquest of Bread was that communism would and should be implemented to begin with in one town and its surrounding countryside, here Kropotkin set out to show that a self-sufficient anarchist communist society could be established in the two islands that make up the British Isles.

In the 1880s, as I said, Kropotkin really believed that a Socialist revolution was more or less round the corner. When it became clear that this was not the case, he settled down to trying to give anarchism a scientific basis in much the same way as Engels did for socialism. And just as Engels spoke of "scientific socialism", so Kropotkin spoke of "scientific anarchism". Kropotkin was in fact better-qualified to do this than Engels since he was actually a scientist himself, having made a major contribution to an understanding of the geology and geography of North East Asia and nearly becoming the Secretary of the Russian Geographic Society (he had been offered the post, but turned it down in order to devote his life to revolutionary activity).

Kropotkin's great achievement here was undoubtedly his book Mutual Aid (1902), which used to be on the bookshelves of every Socialist (in fact we used to sell it as a Socialist book along with those of Marx and Engels). Subtitled "A Factor in Evolution", this was a refutation of the Social Darwinist view (then very popular as a defence and justification of capitalism) that capitalism was natural as "the struggle for existence" and "the survival of the fittest" were inevitable features of all animal societies, including those formed by the animal species homo sapiens.

Kropotkin produced the evidence to show that "mutual aid" and cooperation had been an important factor in both biological and social evolution. It was the right book at the right time as far as Socialists were concerned and by the right person, a Socialist who had had some scientific training and experience. This no doubt explains its one-time immense popularity amongst critics of capitalism. It showed that nature was not like capitalism and that human beings were social, cooperating animals and not isolated, competing individuals. This has since been confirmed many times by other scientists anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists and others and is now an integral part of the case for socialism as a refutation of the so-called "human nature" objection.

Incidentally, the American scientific writer Stephen Jay Gould in his collection of articles Bully for Brontosaurus has a chapter on Kropotkin called "Kropotkin Was No Crackpot" in which he says that most of what Kropotkin wrote in Mutual Aid has stood the test of time, even if he did commit the same fallacy as the Social Darwinists (to reach the opposite conclusion, of course) of arguing from what happened in the rest of nature to what should happen in human society.

Creating an anarchist tradition
The other thing Kropotkin did, once his revolutionary days were over, was to try to create an anarchist tradition separate and distinct from the socialist tradition. Originally, those who became the anarchists were one of a number of different groups within the First International, a group which saw themselves as Socialists and who called themselves Socialists. They stood for the end of the rule and privileges of the bourgeoisie, for the common ownership of productive resources, for the abolition of the wages system and for production for use not profit. In other words, they were part and saw themselves as part of a broader anti-capitalist movement.

This, no doubt, is why we today would find just as much to agree with in the writings of those in this tradition Kropotkin, Malatesta. Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman and others as we do in the writings of those more directly in our tradition like Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov. And our differences with them on how to get to the classless stateless, wageless, moneyless society that is Socialism are no greater, or no less, than those with the Social Democratic tradition of the Second International from which we emerged.

Perhaps because he saw that most of those who called themselves Socialists (and the German Social Democrats in particular) stood in fact for State capitalism, Kropotkin became the prime mover in an attempt to invent a separate "anarchist" tradition. Although he himself was a thorough-going Communist, he dropped the insistence on standing for a moneyless and wageless society as a condition for admission to this tradition in favour of standing only for a stateless society.

As a result, some strange people, from a working class point of view, came to be included in particular extreme individualists like Max Stirner as well as various currency cranks and free marketeers and other advocates of complete laissez-faire in the tradition of Proudhon. All of them raving anti-Socialists but with whom Kropotkin felt some affinity just because they envisaged the disappearance of the State even though they were all in favour of money and the market.

It has to be said that Kropotkin (who wrote the contribution on "Anarchism" that appeared for years in the Encyclopaedia Britannica) largely succeeded in creating this anarchist tradition which lumped together all those who opposed the state from whatever point of view. It has affected anarchism ever since. Most anarchists today justify their anarchism not on the grounds that they want to abolish the State because it is an instrument of class oppression and defender of private property and capitalist exploitation, but on the grounds of the "right of the individual" to be unrestrained by any external authority. Look at the various anthologies of anarchism in the bookshops and you will see that the socialist element has shrunk to a distinct minority viewpoint.

The idea of the isolated, completely independent and unrestrained individual is an absurd proposition, both from the philosophical point of view and from the point of view of social theory. It assumes that the individual exists prior to society. And it is this that makes it absurd since, clearly, society exists prior to any particular individual. An individual human being does not, and could not, exist outside society: all the things that makes humans specifically human arose in and through society language, abstract thought, the transmission of acquired experience by non-biological means, the consciousness of being a separate individual, even our physical attributes (voice box, brain size), all these are social products.

Society is of course composed of individuals, but of social and already socialised individuals, not of previously independently-existing individuals who came together to set up society and who retain certain pre-existing rights against society, including the right not to comply with majority decisions if they don't want to. People who take up this position are opposing not so much the State as Society. The ironic thing here is that Kropotkin's Mutual Aid is one of the best refutations of extreme individualist position, which of course is shared by open supporters of capitalism as well as probably by most anarchists nowadays.

It was because he understood that anarchists, including some who regarded themselves as Communists, were taking up an anti-society rather than a simple anti-State position that William Morris always refused to call himself an anarchist; in fact to denounce anarchism (in this sense) as an impossibility. This from a man who is on record as saying:

"State Socialism? I don't agree with it, in fact I think the two words contradict one another, and that it is the business of Socialise to destroy the State and put Free Society in its place"(Morris, Commonweal, 17 May 1890, p.479).

So there would have been no need for Marx to have been clairvoyant in the early 1880s and warned Kropotkin against going off the rails by associating with anti-socialist, individualist anarchists as he was to after Marx's death. Morris could have done it for him, and no doubt did since Morris and Kropotkin met frequently up to Morris's own death in 1896.

It only remains to mention the sad end to Kropotkin's political life. When in 1914 war broke out Kropotkin came out in vociferous support of the British-French-Russian side against the German-Austro-Hungarian side in that struggle for markets, trade routes and spheres of influence. He was immediately disowned as a traitor (as he was) by most of the anarchist movement.

It was clear that his character was marred by a deep-rooted anti-German prejudice which led him to advocate and cheer on the slaughter of millions of workers in a conflict between two imperialist power blocs. Even after he returned to Russia following the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917 he still advocated continued Russian participation in the slaughter. The Russian soldiers, however, were more sensible. They voted with their feet, as Lenin put it, by simply walking away from the front.

Kropotkin died in Russia in February l921 and his funeral was the occasion of the last public opposition to the state capitalist regime Lenin and the Bolsheviks were setting up in Russia. He died a discredited old man, but this should not detract from his contribution to socialist ideas in the rest of his. life. After all. some others who we have always recognised made a contribution, such as Kautsky and Plekhanov, also took (separate) sides in this imperialist slaughter. And we are on record as criticising Marx for his support of the British-French-Turkish side in the Crimean War.

I want to end on a point anarchists should appreciate. This talk has been called "What Marx Should Have Said to Kropotkin". But neither Marx nor Kropotkin should be regarded as authorities, whose views should be accepted just because they put them forward. They should be regarded simply as two 19th century Socialists who made some interesting contributions to the development of Socialist ideas. Their views are not, and should not be regarded, as any more "authoritative" than those of any of us in this room. The case for a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society rests on the facts and on its own merits, not on what one or other great man may or may not have said or written.

Adam Buick